The Top-50 Hitters Ever: Introduction

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be counting down my opinion of the 50 greatest hitters ever. Baserunning and defense will not be taken into consideration, and it will be strictly a measure of pure hitting.

The articles will (hopefully) be put out nightly and each will profile five hitters, until the top hitter ever is revealed.

When deciding the rankings, I used many determination factors.

I mainly used Tom Tango’s weighted on-base average (wOBA), which weights each positive result of a plate appearance and compares that weighting to the player’s number of plate appearances.

I also took into consideration the gap between the hitter’s performance and the league average during their career, the hitter’s performance during the peak of their career, and the era in which the hitter played in.

Due to the unavailability of some earlier numbers, some calculations may be somewhat off, but I feel that the rankings are a very accurate measure of the hitters’ performance.

One large part of my rankings that may be argued against is the fact that I strayed away from traditional counting statistics when compiling the rankings.

As a result, you may see some familiar names lower than what you would think or not on the list at all, as well as a few unknown names on the list.

In fact, six players in the 500 Home-Run Club and 16 in the 3,000 Hit Club failed to make the list, while there are four players on the list who have been eligible for the Hall of Fame and passed on by the voters (not including players on the ineligible list).

The rankings also take every era of baseball into consideration, all the way from the 1870s to players that are presently in the league.